Colleen Kim Daniher

 

Colleen Kim Daniher is a writer, teacher, and maker of performance. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and has held previous appointments at San Francisco State University, Brown University, and Amherst College.  She received her PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University; she also holds an MA in Theatre Studies from the University of Guelph and concurrent undergraduate degrees in English and Music from Western University in Ontario, Canada.

Dr. Daniher’s research spans Asia and the Americas and focuses on the consolidation and contestation of categories of race, gender, and nation through performance practices both historical and contemporary. She is the co-editor, with Dr. Marlis Schweitzer, of Women’s Innovations in the Theatre, Dance, and Performance Vol. 1: Performers (forthcoming, Bloomsbury-Methuen Press 2027), and her book on imperial racial formations and nineteenth-century mixed-raced actresses and entertainers is under contract with the University of Iowa Press.

Her scholarship has been recognized and supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the American Society for Theatre Research. Her writing has appeared in Theatre Journal, TDR, Women & Performance, e-misférica, Modern Drama, Theatre Annual, Theatre Research in Canada, and Canadian Theatre Review, as well as in two forthcoming edited book collections with McGill-Queen’s University Press. In 2021, her article “Looking at Pauline Johnson: Gender, Race, and Delsartism’s Legible Body” won the Outstanding Article Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. At present, she is in the early stages of a new project on the impact of British and Japanese empire on the making and doing of Chinese-Malayan family formations, circa 1890-1957. Her own maternal family history of multi-generational serial adoption serves as a basis for this research.

Dr. Daniher’s research and teaching are informed by a commitment to integrating performance practice and theory. Her performance-based artist training spans a degree in classical music (Voice), amateur musical theatre performance, devised theatre dramaturgy and directing, and multimedia solo performance art.